Your cordless phone works to let you communicate within the walls of your home, but if you take it into the street, its signal quickly fades. Mobile phones are there to fill our need for keeping connected on the go, but at a greater expense than your home phone line. Just like your cordless phone, wireless computer networks using WiFi or more specifically, 802.11b or 802.11g work well within the walls of your home or campus but quickly fade once you leave the typical 100-foot range of the network access point.
A new technology, called WiMAX or 802.16e by the cognoscetti, promises to let your laptop connect to the Internet faster from access points up to 30 miles away. These are distances even greater than your cellular phone connects to today. If you are so inclined to know, WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability of Microwave Access. Surprised? I didn't guess it would stand for that either.
How Does WiMAX Work?
Although the standard for this technology is not completely defined, it is being tested in some cities as a back-haul between the current standard WiFi. This initial setup requires two wireless radios situated at each access point. The first radio operates on WiMAX to receive a connection to the Internet or even ricocheted through a second access point, which in turn is connected to the Internet in what is known as a mesh network.
The other radio at the access point communicates over WiFi frequencies that are compatible with wireless cards inside laptops. An important call to action test of this gear was when Intel sent WiMAX hardware to the Gulf Coast after hurricane Katrina. The equipment was used to quickly rebuild communication infrastructure since the storm destroyed fiber switches and traditional telephone pole wired circuits....
Click here to read the rest of the article at YoungMoney.com.